


For Ever After

by voleuse



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-04-22
Updated: 2004-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-07 06:26:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voleuse/pseuds/voleuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heroes aren't always rewarded.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For Ever After

**Author's Note:**

> Futurefic. Dark. Headings taken from _A Dream Of Death_ by William Butler Yeats.

_i. i dreamed that one had died in a strange place_

The world never ended.

Buffy thinks it's anticlimactic, if that's the word she remembers from Intro to British Lit. She never checks to make sure.

The world was supposed to end, but it didn't because she and Angel saved it.

Everything kept going. Status quo preserved.

They were left. Two heroes without a mission.

Their friends, powerful though they were, could choose to live relatively normal lives. White picket fences, 2.5 kids, and once in a while, they'd have to exorcise a minor demon from the local shopping mall.

Normal lives.

But not for her, and definitely not for Angel.

_ii. near no accustomed hand_

After the end that wasn't, it was easier on everyone if she and Angel weren't around so much. Haunting the suburbs and office buildings, hoping that evil would be afoot.

She didn't mind leaving. It was like a vacuum to her, the normality leaching bits of _her_ through her skin.

She persuaded Angel to follow her to a far city, away from markers of the past. She found an apartment while he huddled in the boiler room of an ocean liner, and that night he crept in through the window.

She didn't leave them a forwarding address. They didn't ask.

_iii. and they had nailed the boards above her face_

On her better days, she thinks about calling them. She knows they expect her to, that her lack of contact so far might be attributed to the difficulties of traveling obscurely.

It's hard to consider phone calls, however, when she can see Angel from where she sits in the kitchen.

At night, they go out. Buffy teaches the odd martial arts class, and if they run across random evil, they kill it.

During the day, she sits in the kitchen, picks at a bowl of fruit, and watches Angel watch their heavy curtains.

One day he'll open them, she knows.

_iv. the peasants of that land_

Money is tough, sometimes, and Buffy is glad that Joyce never lived to see her resort to petty thievery in order to survive. The odd martial arts class is helpful, but it doesn't keep them in cereal and blood, and it certainly doesn't pay the rent.

It's simple, really, and she thinks it's poetic justice. Vampires steal stuff from people, right? It's only fair that she reclaim them on behalf of humanity.

It's small change, most of the time--a few bills, a watch, maybe a nice piece of jewelry.

Buffy's on very good terms with the local pawn shop.

_v. wondering to lay her in that solitude_

On Angel's better days, they fuck.

On his bed, or hers. Against the front door. In the shower. On the kitchen table, or the floor of the hallway.

It's always noisy, violent, and loveless.

It's going through the motions, because this is what they thought they would do, if given the opportunity. This is what they expected, except that it's not at all that. They had thought, in the past, that being together would mean the curse lifted, or shanshu.

Now they know better.

There is no such thing as perfect happiness.

The neighbors probably assume they're married, she thinks.

_vi. and raised above her mound_

In the middle of the night, at the hour of the wolf, when nothing is open except 24-hour liquor stores, they wander through the streets.

She knows that Xander, if she called him, would want make some joke about putting Angel on a leash, then think better of it.

It's all she can think to do at night; a brief respite from their bare apartment and the endless stream of people they encounter. (She imagines them all dead; drained and torn. Would she have been happier?)

If they're lucky, they find a vampire lurking. Then, they don't have to talk.

_vii. a cross they had made out of two bits of wood_

There's a large church in their neighborhood; it looks like what churches look like in the movies, she thinks. Imposing and dark, and inside, flickering shadows and candlelight.

Angel is drawn there, every once in a while, and she's usually too weary to protest.

She lights a candle, for what she's not sure, while he stares at the altar and cries. She doesn't ask why, and she never does herself. She ran out of tears long ago.

He wants to confess, sometimes, and takes steps in that direction, but she doesn't let him, and in the end, he doesn't dare.

_viii. and planted cypress round_

She only has regular nightmares, now, and in between those, she dreams of California. Of tiled boulevards lined with shoes, chicken enchiladas with sour cream, and an endless parade of cars.

And always, always of the beach.

It's not that she has anything against the concrete-and-trees of their new home, really, but it's not what she'd call paradise. (She refuses to remember her brief stay in heaven.) It's pretty enough, she supposes.

The city, however, doesn't have the warm scrunch of sand between her toes, or the murmur of the ocean as it eases nearer.

She wonders if she'll ever see sunlight again.

_ix. and left her to the indifferent stars above_

One afternoon, she slips into the bathroom to paint her toenails, and when she emerges, Angel's seat on the couch is vacant.

Instead, he's standing by the window, his hands are twitching the curtains aside.

She curses and rushes forward, knocking him away from a stray ray of sunlight before setting the drapes closed again.

She ignores his railing (he's done it before) and drags a chair over to the window, sits down, and crosses her arms.

She watches his anger dissolve into whimpers, and wonders when he became so pathetic.

She wishes she had returned a few minutes later.

_x. until i carved these words  
she was more beautiful than thy first love  
but now lies under boards_

She doesn't go to work that night, and they don't go out.

They don't move much from their places; she in her chair, he huddled on the floor. She watches him watch her. They eye each other like opponents, and she realizes that they are, a little bit.

She wonders when she stopped caring about him, and he for her.

She wonders why she bothers to stay. It would be so simple to just _leave_ him to his dusty demise, to go back to California, to find some sort of purpose.

But she can't imagine anything else.

She thinks the world ended after all, because there can't be any worse hell than this.


End file.
